I'll give it a go tonight. It should probably be integrated with the faction missions though, it would be a bit weird to have separate systems for bounty hunting, my old one with specific types as targets and yours, but with completely different entry points.

My first version of this required either an Ardar license or a Terra license in order to do it, but it made it a little more complex, and I didn't have time to flush out all the story stuff about how the license would be procured.

Would you like this tied to the Auxilliary I and the Ensign ranks? or would you like a faction based Bounty Hunter License?

Some of the ideas I had around bounty hunting was that there could be different bounty hunter licenses.

The first would give a bounty for pirates.The second would give a bounty for barbarians.The third would upgrade the license so that more money would be earned for bountiesThe fourth would be faction based and give bounties on killing units of the opposing faction.

Well, my biggest concern is basically it making sense from a "story" perspective. That means it should be tied to factions really, who else would offer those bounties? So the easier would be to tie it into the existing faction missions. It could even replace the basic existing named pirate hunting missions.

Alternatively, I suppose the rewards could be coming from some kind of traders' association, which would have the advantage of making it pan-Galactic. Hmm. After all there is precedence with the Great Survey... What do you think?

Whichever way we go I like the idea of having licenses with different levels.

I absolutely agree that it needs to make sense from a Story perspective and that it does not right now. I think you are correct that the faction is really where it should start. This allows me to then offer bounties for killing opposite faction ships.

Do you have a problem with creating 5 additional licenses to be rewarded from faction based missions?

The faction-generic licenses are an issue I fear if the bounty hunting is linked to factions... I think I'd prefer one per level for each faction. However to limit clutter, maybe remove the previous one whenever a new one is given for the same faction? For the ranks I can't do it because that would break the ties with ship and outfit purchases, but here you only need the licenses for checks in the event scripts.

regarding the tie-in with the faction missions, maybe do something like having the bounty hunting thing start at the same time as the first piracy or barbarian mission, then evolve independently? Though it seems a bit weird to have two progression trees with what is after all fairly similar missions...

1 bis and 3 would be obvious points where to tie-in the pirate and barbarian licenses. Then maybe have an extra mission or two in their own branch to get the upgraded licenses? Though we have to define what they do. Just raising the reward is not great I think, maybe more give specific bigger rewards for tackling the bigger ships?

Sounds cool! I couldn't try it yesterday, will try tonight. Can you also limit the reward to systems with an Imperial presence? It should just be a matter of doing a test such as cur_system:presences()[G.EMPIRE] > 0.

Two remarks :- this isn't linked to yours, but my revised spawn has way too much barbarians and way too little pirates. That make the pirate elimination mission really tough to do, barbarians keep killing the target ship before you get there.- the payment is a little low, I got only 50k for destroying a Kestrel... maybe double it?

Starting to add the second mission of the series in. Trying to setup a kill x of 10 pirate mission. Turned out to be a little more complicated than expected, but finally have it working, with a few bugs to still clean up.

Just doubled the reward for killing pirate ships. All the numbers are subject to change once I sit down and start hashing out all the other numbers.